I’m starting a buzz campaign to bring Music Mondays from Twitter to Google Buzz. For those who unfamiliar with Music Mondays, people simply tweet the music they’ve been listening to lately to generate some Twitter activity and to help spread the news about good recording artists.
Music Mondays make more sense on Buzz than Twitter because you can embed YouTube videos directly into a buzz. Simply put “Music Monday” in your buzzes (hashtags on Buzz are for losers) and share your favorites. Maybe include a brief bit about why you like the song or how you discovered it.
My campaign is, admittedly, off to a very warm reception but a slow start because I only have 260 followers on my personal account and 124 on my blog account. Please consider rebuzzing this post with the buzz this link below or just buzz “Music Mondays are now on Google Buzz. Please post a YouTube video like this one…” To embed a YouTube video, just click on the insert link button in your buzz box and paste a YouTube URL into it.
My buzz tomorrow will be a terrific Beck music video with cool robots in it that I discovered on YouTube earlier today. Follow me on Buzz to see and hear it tomorrow. Click here to follow me.
UPDATE: If you want to search buzz for all Music Monday posts with videos, do the following search: “music monday has:videos”
Everyone is buzzing about how to use Google Buzz and whether it will succeed. Some are still tweeting about privacy concerns. Everyone wants to know whether Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz can coexist. In this post, I take a different approach. I begin with the assumption that Google Buzz will succeed and consider what effects that will have on the world of blogging and on more mainstream digital media. I conclude that Google Buzz will have profound effects that significantly differ from effects of any other social networking site that currently exists.
If you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon and played around on Google Buzz, you haven’t missed much. I’ll tell you what’s been going on the past few days. It seems like almost all of the buzz is about Buzz. This isn’t exactly a bad thing, however; Google employees have been working around the clock to respond to user feedback with improvements, according to the Official Gmail blog. Many of the improvements relate to online privacy and the auto-follow feature (which is now an auto-suggest feature).
I believe that Google Buzz is primarily aimed at attracting Twitter content right now, not Facebook content. This is a follow up post to the video I recently posted.
Not much to say about this other than BlackBerryRocks.Com just posted the links. See the post here: http://bit.ly/9pGQjl. Use the Desktop Manager install.
P.S. Can’t handle multiple accounts. P.P.S. WTF? RIM’s finally getting around to releasing a Twitter app when Twitter is about to be owned by Google Buzz? 9 million buzzes in 2 days.
Here I gripe about Google Buzz…
I believe that Google Buzz has a lot of potential and I’m digging it. However, it has some kinks that need to be worked out:
- Notifications should skip the Gmail inbox by default. We can see the notifications in the left-hand pane and don’t need to intermingle buzz with email. Filters can be used to route the buzz to archives and skip the inbox (instructions courtesy of LifeHacker at http://goo.gl/3Iyt) but it would make more sense to have a toggle whether the user wants buzz in the inbox.
- Kudos to Google for making responses to buzzes (which work like comments on a blog) editable. However, it would be really nifty if the buzz responses were (a) nested and (b) could be hidden. Many popular buzzes have so many comments that it’s almost impossible to follow the conversation. The clutter on the page is overwhelming too.
- The “Mute” button doesn’t work. Be warned: If you mute a buzz you commented on, then new replies will all show up in your new buzz count. Because the mute button doesn’t work, long discussions like the ones Mashable started are to be avoided.
- The “Mute” button is dangerously close to the “Unfollow” button.
- Let us harvest our Facebook friends list and add them in buzz. While I appreciate the efforts to avoid mentioning Facebook anywhere and not link to it, the ability to draw in our existing social networks would be helpful. Pulling in Twitter followers simply doesn’t cut it for many of us.
I’m actually kind of digging buzz but the issues I identified above need to be addressed ( at least 1 through 4) or this ship won’t sail.
P.S. Mini-Gripe: Couldn’t Google add some more background/color themes to Gmail? The existing ones get mighty boring.
The Wall Street Journal and Mashable are reporting that Google will soon roll out a “status update” feature to Gmail similar to Facebook and Twitter. This is BIG news and “Make Gmail Social” (which appears in the Mashable headline) is now a trending topic on Twitter.
The Eagle has landed. The much anticipated UberTwitter Beta-6 has arrived. UberTwitter was voted 2009 Blackberry App of the Year by Crackberry users. Beta-6 is packed full of new features, including:
- Comprehensive Twitter list support. Lists are probably the best thing that has happened to Twitter since the advent of the URL shortener. With UberTwitter, you can create new lists, delete existing lists, subscribe to lists by SMS, add members and remove members.
- Find people. You can search Twitter for users just like you can from the web interface.
- The Uber-bar has tabs for easy navigation between @ replies, DMs and timelines. Apparently, you can also customize the bar to include a list but I was unable to add a tab when I tested UberTwitter Beta-6. Update: Got it now. You have to add them from the “Lists” option and then you can arrange them using the “Uber-bar Maintenance” feature.
- Better Geo-Tagging (using Twitter’s integrating Geo-Tagging or myloc.me).
- And, many more enhancements.
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One of the big stories this week is that Twitter will turn a net profit this year simply due to its content sales to Google and Bing, according to Bloomberg. For a cool $25 million, Google and Bing are indexing every public tweet. Twitter’s operating expenses for 2009 will be approximately $20 million. Accordingly, Twitter will return approximately a $5 profit for 2009, which comes as a surprise to many. Currently, Twitter has no other sources of revenue. 2010 is expected to be turning point for Twitter in terms of cranking up the revenue, according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. How can this be accomplished without alienating users?
UberTwitter is adding two new terrific features and making changes that don’t affect the interface that will improve the app’s performance. The two noticeable changes, as shown in the pictures below of the .941 test release, are auto-complete of usernames and customizable tabs with color icons.
SocialScope is the combined Facebook and Twitter App for the Blackberry smartphone that is under development. It is currently in invitation-only beta testing. I wrote about it a last month. The @SocialScope Twitter account was silent for about a month but just tweeted this evening that the release version will support FourSquare, the location-based networking/game of sorts.
TweetDeck Beta 0.32.1 was released today. As the second most popular twitter interface (just behind twitter’s own web interface), this is big news! The new release supports Twitter lists, LinkedIN and keyboard shortcuts. Head over to TweetDeck.Com to download (Adobe AIR).
Today Seesmic released a Twitter app for Blackberry and Android phones. I tested it on the Blackberry. It is a full featured Twitter client and an easy choice over Ubertwitter and Twitterberry. Brief review follows along with download barcode.
A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.
